Suggested Podcast Part 1 of 2 – Steve Earle at the Newport Folk Festival 2008: Premises

(To jump immediately to the NPR (amazing) podcast of the live concert of Steve Earle at the Newport Folk Festival, hit the link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93226876 – Below you can find just a few thoughts on the subject.)

SHOWING AMERICA, ONE EPISODE AT THE TIME. THE WIRE, A SERIES.

Earlier last year, i stumbled across an american TV series called The Wire.

I got interested in this series because of some comments above a YouTube video and at a first glance the visuals, the script, the mood in it intrigued me. Turned out to be quite a surprise – David Simon (screenwriter, writer, journalist) and Ed Burns (homicide detective, screenwriter), the series creators, nailed one of the best scripts i’ve seen since quite a bit of time.

Watching this story in the form of a episodic, downloadable-in-files serial, i need to spend a few words on how the form worked: never interrupted by any spot, is able to stand as a compromise between your time, the time you are able to cut from a day full of tasks, and their time, a 60 minutes long episode. The Divx format is making these 60 minutes very accessible, everywhere you have a computer, a laptop or a tv with dvd player, even a last generation mobile phone, and whenever you know you’ll have 60 minutes of free time, that, let’s face it, in today’s routine, they could be scattered anywhere in a day: a train ride, a lunch-break in a park, an empty afternoon at work, a dinner. Go to the bathroom, and you’re not going to loose a bit of it – you could even be able to bring it with you – a personal intimate dimension where you have total control of the time and flow of the content is one of the keys that is shifting the preferred form of entertainment from the ol’ National Broadcast TV networks to the computers and consoles. Instead of being a one-shot concert that requires you to hold your pee if you really care about following it, the episodes creates single mini-shots more affordableand dynamic in term of times and space (and money, if you know other ways to get it besides the legal ones). Every single episode then, creates it’s own time in your daytime like a single song played on your MP3 player.

Periodically offering a portion of it, it tries continually to make you interested, and in the long term will probably succeeds, even more if everyone around you already is interested.

Following two different narrative lines, one across each episode and one that starts and ends every single episode, feeds the different levels of narration that every spectator needs for entertainment.

More and constantly works better then once and for all. In comparison with movies, it even gives continuity to the serial if the time between an episode and the other is used by spectators to produce a good amount of speculation (check the official forums to witness) – a creative and very active role (in a cognitive sense of course) for a spectator. It’s a sort of medium-specific relative to Keichiro Toyama’s construction of plots in videogames, where you deal the plot in separated pieces to let the player play with the game even on a cognitive level.

Then, let me say, to keep the flow of the new episodes, the flow of the news and the flow of metaverse on the same line, a bigger amount of spectators are discovering, in a country proud for the quality of its dubbing, the pleausure of original language with translated subtitles. A series like Lost is a global, multistratified, global practice other then a series. The Wire, to be understood, should be watched in original language, so instead of the cultural mediation would happen outside yourself, would happen as a way to know each other and make confrontation, inside yourself.

Last but not least, through repeated and dynamic experiences inducing empathy, sympathy, antipathy and pity, gives you, through a window in someone’s sitting room or tent, a relationship with characters that is characterized by being long.The long term engagement, in comparison to cinema, marks a difference that could be compared to the one between an encounter and a friendship.

Last but not least, as Orson Wells once said “I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts“. Every episode, and every series, knows how to build it’s own cliffhangers. If you like the material, then keep going, please.

To make it to the audience, a good amount of skills by the writers was surely needed, but probably what made the difference was a less then spoiled private network (it’s the HBO) that knew how to capitalize on it and so didn’t care much about the stance taken by the writers, that is fiercely cinic, satyrical and realistic.Let me point out “realistic” once again: the show is fulfilled with stories collected during both author’s career. True stories are fictionalized through different steps, and the same happens for fictional plots, that that are spawned by the authors with an evident soul of reality in them.

Unmistakably, in the States currently the TV serials are more successful and more based on quality then ever before, but we’re talking about a kind of quality that made this drama stand out on his own even in comparison to the best material on every medium to come out in a while.

Taking place in Baltimore, Maryland, the show offers insights on the american city while we cruise through the streets, bars, offices and sitting rooms with the premise of following a drug trade and the efforts of an investigation unit to catch the gangs involved in it using a wiretap-based surveillance.

Baltimore, soon introduced as “Bodymore” (click) to set the tone, is explored through the lives of many characters living in its different inner realities and soon uses the investigation as a vehicle for this exploration. Since the first scene, it evades and plays with the (stereo)typical cop-drama show formulas, focusing on the characters and “what it means for them to live committed to an institution” and to deal with its actual organization, complex politics, peculiar dynamics and ambiguous relationships. Conceived this way, it soon starts to knit a web of deeper, wider storylines that spreads in every direction, from the the peripheral housing projects to the harbor and the richer Northern region, following events involving workers’ unions, policemen\women, Baltimore Sun journalists, drug pushers, schools teachers and students, judges and lawyers, blue collar workers, white collar workers, priests, university researchers, politicians (even the mayor). Topics like the racial issues (Baltimore is a 64% afroamerican populated city, and we see a white politician trying to run for mayor and convincing an afroamerican colleague to run for the same role just to divide the vote of the afroamerican citizens), corruption, immigration, economic recession, beaurocracy, politics, the chain of command, the school system, the core dynamics of a newspaper are analyzed, criticized and showed with less words then needed, avoiding cheesy expected social commentaries.

The series seems to go always in and out of several genres, crossing them, bending them, coming in and out of them. When they’re done showing a side of the things, they start to show the other, and then mix them until there is never a single, or fixed perspective.

In America, where George W. Bush is doing what he is doing with a smile on his face, a paternalistic attitude and in the name of god – when the big managers of the falling economic empires are declaring bankrupcy while earning million of dollars at the same time – where people without money and accessibility to the services are left to struggle between themselves – are the americans really going to deal again with good versus bad again?

Are they still going to believe in untouchables, in machos, in never-failing police forces, in John Wayne like cowboys? The globally diffused fun made against  Chuck Norris says the contrary. Brokeback Mountain says they’re tired. James Gandolfini, the actor that plays Tony Soprano, leaves behind his shoulders a past character found in Tony Scott’s and Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance and offers the modern ironic adventures of Tony The Wiseguy, son, father and husband, against The Nosy Shrink.

Another american was another reflection of this in his own way: when Barack Obama said that The Wire was his favourite series and Omar Little, one of the most appreciated characters of the show, his favourite character, meant to send another message coherent with the political change he’s promising in the campaign: Omar is a tough gunslinger, but contrary to the clichè, he’s gay, robs only drugdealers, has a strict moral code and sometimes acts like a Baltimore’s Robin Hood  – quite a smart political move in response to McCain, that said that his favourite TV character of all time is Maverick…Obama found his favourite in a self-made, lone, black Robin Hood that seems like an incarnation of his life and political program. Let’s speculate even more: As everyone in The Wire, no matter what happens, keeps going on with their life trying to change themselves or their surroundings, it’s no surprise that the man that is trying to reach the presidency with the political rethoric of hope choose this series to declare his audiovisual tastes.

Anyway, playing with classic plots and stressing them towards both the expected and the unexpected, David Simon choose to depict the ambiguity of the human being, and showing the moral conflicts is Simon’s biggest concern.

It’s not easy to grab in one move the whole essence of this result.

In the States, in 2008, that’s what came out from a private subscription-based network channel that later is airing entertaining, smile inspiring clichèd american mafia wiseguys in The Sopranos. All the series are, first of all, requested to deal with a good amount of clichès abused in the past. While The Sopranos works at different narrative levels too, the clichè of the macho wiseguy is very much needed  to let the trigger for the comedy factor work, and so exists in the series like a creative device and not a mere clichè: you need a villain with an accent that kills other criminals in the typical sterotype of the italian mafioso to later warp him into a life made of problems, routines and close relationships. Which family is really the hardest to deal with?  In an America where the citizens are constantly on the edge of their nerves between alarms pounding, fast routines and lack of solid state service and a scary sanitary system, every man would say “hey, daily life is more tough that the one of those guys”.

It’s not even easy to spot the boundaries between the creative efforts of the writers and the promotion built by the network on a commercial product:but again, even if you take into account that the series was shown by a private commercial network and aired for commercial reasons as an expensive visual industrial product, the writers delivered, nonetheless.

I’M ITALIAN, AND I’M WATCHING IT IN ITALY: FORTUNATELY ENOUGH, NOT IN ITALIAN THOUGH.

It’s a bit embarassing for me to search in an american series for something that i would find in ours and  that in Italy’s cinema history has always been present and actually, is part of what we’re known in the world for. I’m talking about movies of Petri, Rosi, Ferrara, Leone, Sorrentino for example. All of them exposing the black rotting substance that fills the gaps of our machine.

But it’s easy to get why: when you see that while a series like this at least offers, in a private network on a valid national scale, a noteworthy screenwriting quality and such a more realistic-oriented, critical representation of the institutions, do you still think that i would get interested in what’s showed in Italy, on the public and private networks, basically all owned by the 16 times under criminal charges Silvio Berlusconi, at the same time prime minister and owner of three Private TV channels? We’re just continuously pounded with cheesy, empty, glorifing, “tarallucci biscuits and wine” plastic shows and small-town-priests-turned-detectives and preservers of the last human values that act as moral heroes.

Italians always have their share fun looking at the others’ dirty laundry while The Wire is aired in italian in the Fox channel as a “criminal series” with a useless terrible dubbing, but when it comes to ours…that’s cosa nostra. While currently our cinema honoured that strong past for dealing with our half truths carrying on with movies like “Gomorra” , Il “Caimano” and “Il Divo”, i wonder if in this country there’s even a possibility for something like The Wire to exist (be thought, written, approved and aired) for a large scale, television based, audience that wants to be provoked.

It’s not only about the fact that such result seems to be impossible to be ever achieved on a public network, but we even have to be harassed with a skillfull idiotic promotional surrogate that would better to not even exist. Even on a private italian or non-italian network, i just can’t imagine such a Wire like level of critical approach to be produced and aired. Can you imagine a play in which a prime minister gives directions on a state television network director on who to hire, and then promising favours and protection when that director will venture in opening an enterprise?  Or one where it shows how in the new left wing party they find a strategic, tricky, forced ways to split the party’s associates for the success of a single candidate? How the government or the police elaborate strategies to create fake percentages on a national scale? Or how newspapers get their journalists and how the majority of them works, and the relationship they have with the political parties?

Or, let’s say, Rome’s mayor wiping dust off his beloved fascist memorabilia and the relationship he has with the people who gave him those items? Or the phonecalls between the police officials and the minister during the night of a three days manifestation during the G8 to plan an onslaught against the pacifists and common people sleeping in a public school? Or a minister elected performing a fellatio on the prime minister and being preferred for that?

In a TV series? In Italy?

La Squadra, aired by RAI3, what is usually considered the best achieved result. To me, “it” knows,  when to stop talking, if it ever talks, and offers no insight at all on what’s showing behind the most superficial ones. Eight seasons of politically correct porridge that takes classic arcs and feeds them as clichès, without offering deeper insights, but keeping to entertain in preceptive manners, throwing a few flat lines on commonly acknowledged topics like eutanasia and radiated uranium bullets for a “serious topic” moment (well, anyway, the writing quality will not be missed). It shows with pretentiously attitude an imaginary police station (of course, in Naples, otherwise where would it be?! Oh, Please…) as it was to be located in an imaginary italy, where above and around the police system and the policemen there’s noone. Oh, but luckily it was even officially approved by the italian Police, it is even based on a pre-made sellable international commercial format, and It is even produced by the national TV service RAI FICTION but distributed by Berlusconi’s Mediaset under the name “The Squad”.

For now, we’ll stick to this then, or to the worst, that is really even worthless to comment:

But it’s even more difficult to discuss such topics that meanwhile Berlusconi didn’t loose any time to write an anti-constitutional, law once more cut for himself boicotting the way wiretap surveillance contents can be used and published on media, with a basic condescendent reaction from the center-left wing that probably is afraid of surveillance no more no less than him. Yes, wiretap. While we all listen to his rants about being a victim of the judiciary, he’s snapping his fingers and going anticonstitutional in front of the majority of the citizens in this country that, in line with the way they grew up, looks the other way and hopes he’s going to make a better life for each one of them.Meanwhile, on Youtube we listen to the published glimpses of the wiretaps that are used against him in court for charges like corruption or association with mafia, like this small bit ahead.

This is not peculiar to Italy, but let’s say that around here it happens a little bit more then everywhere else.

Besides its effective quality as an entertainment product, The Wire went way beyond being entertaining. The decision to depict Baltimore’s life starting from a unit of cops chasing a drug trade and a stable private life is done with a remarkable attention to the screenwriting and a realistic approach that constantly drives it towards what Sergio Leone mastered in his spaghetti westerns. As Orson Wells once told Leone, “With a western movie, you can say whatever you want”.

WHAT ABOUT STEVE EARLE?

In the second season, final episode, one of his songs is playing along the visuals of the season’s finale: “I Feel Alright”.

In a series that pays more then an homage to those western movies to be actually considered part of the new western movies rise (No Country For Old Men being one example of it) there’s a song in which Steve, born in Virginia and lived young in Texas, with a classic western frontier-era image, speaks about himself in the first lines: ” I was born my papa son, a wanderin’ eye and a smoking gun“.

This image, that keep us wondering – real event and, or, methaphore? – has been under everyone’s eyes since years. After a while, to me it kept telling how his “wandering eye” self-describes how he looks around, watching what’s going on, focused and aware on a personal social and political level, and of course, at a street level too.

His “smoking gun” are his musical tools, composed of a thinking mind, a mouth that speaks what he thought, and a guitar playing – a political action that goes from refusing the Nashville music industry trying to impose itself on him ( “From Johnny Cash, I learned how an artist carries himself when the industry stops returning phone calls. And that if you have something to say and you keep on saying it loud and true, then people will listen” – Steve Earle, Men’s Journal, 2001) to the decades of calls against the war, from his childhood along his mother up to now, from singing Woodie Guthrie’s songs to making recordings like Ellis Unit One, City Of Immigrants, John Walker’s Blues or The Revolution Starts Now.

A pacifist like Earle using the world “gun” with such metaphorical meanings is like Guthrie using the world “kill” writing on his guitar “This machine kills fascists”.

When Steve Earle writes about Woodie Guthrie says “He became the living embodiment of everything a people’s revolution is supposed to be about: that working people have dignity, intelligence and value above and beyond the market’s demand for their labor”. It’s the finale of the second season, when the song bursts out. Niko, a young stevedore cries on a fence looking at the harbour from the outside, knowing that committing himself to the organized crime made him loose his dignity, family and work. He chose to be on the other side of several fences, now he cries on what he lost that was his since generations.

In different scenes spanned through the seasons, Bubs, a drug addicted homeless 40-like afroamerican man crafts his life in the streets trying to straightening it how somehow, even giving a chance to get clean by taking part in a 12-step meeting. His motivation to drop the syringe is supported by a man named Waylon, his sponsor in the meetings. He appeared since the first season, and are his words that convinced Bubs in trying to get clean meanwhile their relationship grows on trust and respect: “I pawned my bike, my pickup truck, a National Steel guitar, a stamp collection that my grandpa left me; lost a good wife, a bad girlfriend, and the respect of anyone who ever lent me money”.

My National Steel guitar. That guy is Steve Earle. The actor. It’s the first time i’ve seen him out of a CD cover.

“I ask you questions, tell you lies, criticize and sympathize – Be careful what you wish for friend, cause i’ve been in hell and now i’m back again” – (Steve Earle, “I Feel Alright”)

While his sponsorship becomes friendship, Bubs and Waylon characters are constantly playing with their actors. In those scenes a real ex-addict tells a true story with just a name and a role separating him from the reality of his words while a never addicted actor, never even knew anything about drugs, embodies for five seasons who is for the spectators the addict and so embodies “the addiction”, and that knows that the other one is not really acting, he’s telling himself through a role. In Earle’s Waylon both fictional and real sides got fused depicting effectively the pain that surrounds the addiction. But on that bench, only one man is really thinking about a difficult real addiction that finally, starting with powerful recordings and culminating with such acting, is getting more and more exorcized. From a letter sent by Steve Earle to the Tennessean editor, 1997:I am a recovering crack addict with two years, eight months and 29 days clean, thanks to the grace of God and the support of my fellow recovering addicts. Probably, the addiction now can only appear like a ghost to him, with different shapes, sitting on a bench near him, ready to be again sent away, ritually, with arguments that he wish he could tell to anyone – and he did through Waylon’s role.

Knowing his story, i can’t stop seeing Waylon speaking to Bubs like something else – Earle looking at, and speaking to, his experiences. 

I Feel Alight (1996) came after Train A’ Comin (1995), the amazing album that showed how far he wa able to kick the addiction out of himself, but that song embodied his will of reckognizing his strenght more then any other. The same act of reckognizing it is a step needed to better understand problems bigger then yourself. Walon embodies his past in front of the american audience and dramatizes a part of a self conscious, shared, personal process recalling memories of his song CCKMP.

When Steve’s character Waylon somewhere in the (not so) fictional Baltimore sits and feels alright, at the same time Niko walks, in a self crafted complex reality where he simply never will.

In an article later appeared in The New Yorker when the last season of The Wire was being shown on the cable channel, David Simon, head writer, ex-Baltimore Sun journalist and series co-creator, comments that he doesn’t like when in a movie the images are matching a song’s lyrics: “It brutalizes the visual in a way to have the lyrics dead on point” says, “Yet at the same time it can’t be totally off point. It has to glance at what you’re trying to say.”  Based on that statement, the opening credits run along a song written by Tom Waits called “Way Down In The Hole”, but each season a different band plays it.

In the fifth and last season, the one dedicated to the journalism, the main song during the opening credits is being played by Steve Earle.

A few days ago, in the legendary festival founded by Pete Seeger, the Newport Folk Festival, Steve Earle is there, ending his concert with a song: “Way Down In The Hole”.

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NPR NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO PODCAST http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93226876

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~ by Alessandro on October 16, 2008.